What we're reading.
Ten picks from the New York Times Book Review's best books of 2026 so far — titles we're talking about and pressing into people's hands.
Kin
Tayari Jones
A lush historical novel about sisterhood — Jones at the peak of her powers, weaving together three generations of Black women whose fates are bound by love, sacrifice, and the long reach of history.
Find it at BookshopThis Is Where the Serpent Lives
Daniyal Mueenuddin
A sweeping family epic set across continents and decades — Mueenuddin's long-awaited debut novel delivers on every promise his stories made.
Find it at BookshopTranscription
Ben Lerner
A tender meditation on technology, memory, and the gaps between what we mean and what we say — Lerner's most accessible and affecting novel yet.
Find it at BookshopThe Keeper
Tana French
The final Cal Hooper novel brings French's west-of-Ireland village to a reckoning — a tightly wound crime novel that refuses easy answers.
Find it at BookshopStar Shipped
Cat Sebastian
A witty, warm-hearted romance with serious stakes — Sebastian continues her streak of writing love stories that feel genuinely earned.
Find it at BookshopYesteryear
Caro Claire Burke
A tradwife is flung back to the mid-19th century — Burke's debut is a darkly funny interrogation of nostalgia, gender, and the histories we think we want.
Find it at BookshopStrangers: A Memoir of Marriage
Belle Burden
The intimate story of an imploding marriage — Burden writes about love and its dissolution with terrifying honesty and structural precision.
Find it at BookshopDays of Love and Rage
Anand Gopal
A deeply human account of a revolution — Gopal embeds with ordinary people forging extraordinary change, and the result is essential journalism at its most literary.
Find it at BookshopLondon Falling
Patrick Radden Keefe
A mysterious death in a gilded city, and a family's search for truth — Keefe applies his trademark rigor to a story equal parts social history and detective thriller.
Find it at BookshopOn Morrison
Namwali Serpell
Serpell's critical study of Toni Morrison is an act of intellectual love — brilliant, rigorous, and alive to every register of Morrison's genius.
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